Categories are a vital part of Commons, and more important than they are to articles on Wikipedia. It is the way you can navigate to similar content, whereas Wikipedia articles have text that refer to other articles. It should therefore not be condemned to the bottom of the page, placed even below EXIF data.

The categories are indeed hard to find and I think that's also one of the reasons we use "search" more often. This change could make it easier to find similar content. --Débora Medeiros (talk) 04:06, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Categories play a much more important role at Commons than they do at the Wikipedia projects, even if not all users necessarily use categories to the same degree. Even when I do key word searches, it is usually so that I can find the relevant category. Anything that increases the visibility of categories will assist Commons users (esp those who are not necessarily Commons contributors). I am not concerned about differences in interface with other Wikimedia projects, since some such differences already exist. Moreover, moving the location of the categories is a already a preference on Wikipedia, as it is here, so many users already experience a different interface. Ideally, Categories would be placed at the top of the page, above all content, where they are more visible (and do not separate the image from its description). But seeing as how this option appears to be more popular, I will opt for it as it is much better than the status quo. --Skeezix1000 (talk) 20:08, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Seems like a better choice. I don't see the counter-arguments as convincing. JesseW (talk) 06:37, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

--UV (talk) 21:02, 9 August 2013 (UTC) Do not introduce interface inconsistencies with the other Wikimedia projects.

Personally I don't find the categories that useful on Commons. I usually find content by searching instead. Once we have tags, though, I might change my mind. Kaldari (talk) 02:28, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

The categories are important, but the metadata describing the images is more important; we should keep it in this order. Andrew Gray (talk) 13:40, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

While categorizing, it is nice to have (I'd even prefer having them fixed in the sidebar) but it would be always a JS-solution which makes content jumping and introduces inconsistency between other Wikimedia Wikis. I agree with Kaldari that using an initial search is often faster than trying guessing the category-name. A tag-system would be great but only if we can logically combine and qualify tags: A picture showing a beige dog and a white house would be tagged as (dog => beige) | (house => white) or similar so I can search for beige dogs (+) and beige houses (-) and dogs with houses (+). -- Rillke(q?) 06:16, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

I would prefer any systemic solution for all wiki projects. One of possibilities is to display the category bar firmly fixed at the bottom of the screen, independently on scrolling of the page. Also many templates (licences, grants, evaluations) or EXIF table etc. can be more sparing with screen place (more brief, less pompous, partly hidden etc.). But generally, I have no troubles with the current position. Whole content and all parts of the file page are very important, but the most important is only the image itself. (As regards categorization itself, I very appreciate the current universal modular system, but some users would prefer some tagging-system and many users never understand, never like and never use categorization. --ŠJů (talk) 16:08, 25 August 2013 (UTC)